alifah's assigment 1

CURRENT INNOVATION IN FOOD INGREDIENT
Describe ‘uniqueness’ of the innovative or novel ingredient with respect to functional properties.

Peoples throughout the world continue to kill themselves with bad food, which makes them a prime and largely untapped target market for new ingredients that, when added to processed foods and drinks, provide added health benefits. That’s why we need to be more conscious about food that we take daily day. Nutraceutical and functional food ingredients are ingredients with human health benefits beyond basic nutrition. Nutraceutical ingredients are used in non-food supplements for examples tablets, soft gels, and also capsules. Prevention of specific chronic health conditions is the leading reasons peoples buy dietary supplements. These ingredients are also increasingly being added to conventional or mainstream foods and beverages, where the emphasis is on improved nutrition, with a healthful diet it now promoted as a fundamental way to proactively prevent or stem the risk of disease.
For example of food ingredient is Lactobacillus. Lactobacillus is a genus of Gram-positive facultative anaerobic or microaerophilic bacteria. In humans they are symbiotic and are found in the gut flora. There are used for the production of yogurt, cheese, wine, cider, chocolate and other fermented foods, as well as animal feeds such as silage. In recent years much interest has been shown in the use of lactobacilli as probiotic organisms and their potential for disease prevention in humans and animals.

In response to demands from increasingly health conscious consumers, the global trend is for food industries to translate nutritional information into consumer reality by developing food products that provide not only superior sensory appeal but also nutritional and health benefits. Today’s busy life styles are also driving the development of healthy convenience foods. Recent innovations in food technologies have led to the use of many traditional technologies, such as fermentation, extraction, encapsulation, fat replacement, and enzyme technology, to produce new health food ingredients, reduce or remove undesirable food components, add specific nutrient or functional ingredients, modify food compositions, mask undesirable flavors or stabilize ingredients.

Modern biotechnology has even revolutionized the way foods are created. Recent discoveries in gene science are making it possible to manipulate the components in natural foods. In combination with biofermentation, desirable natural compounds can now be produced in large amounts at a low cost and with little environmental impact. Nanotechnology is also beginning to find potential applications in the area of food and agriculture. Although the use of new technologies in the production of health foods is often a cause for concern, the possibility that innovative food technology will allow us to produce a wide variety of food with enhanced flavor and texture, while at the same time conferring multiple health benefits on the consumer, is very exciting